Poems eBook

Now with foreheads blushing
With a rapturous flushing—­
Now the streams are rushing
In among the waves.
Now in shy confusion,
With a pale suffusion,
Seek the wild seclusion
Of sequestered caves.

All the summer hours
Hiding in the bowers,
Scattering silver showers
Out upon the strand;
O’er the pebbles crashing,
Through the ripples splashing,
Liquid pearl-wreaths dashing
From each other’s hand.

By yon mossy boulder,
See an ivory shoulder,
Dazzling the beholder,
Rises o’er the blue;
But a moment’s thinking,
Sends the Naiad sinking,
With a modest shrinking,
From the gazer’s view.

Now the wave compresses
All their golden tresses—­
Now their sea-green dresses
Float them o’er the tide;
Now with elf-locks dripping
From the brine they’re sipping,
With a fairy tripping,
Down the green waves glide.

Some that scarce have tarried
By the shore are carried
Sea-ward to be married
To the glad gods there:
Triton’s horn is playing,
Neptune’s steeds are neighing,
Restless with delaying
For a bride so fair.

See at first the river
How its pale lips quiver,
How its white waves shiver
With a fond unrest;
List how low it sigheth,
See how swift it flieth,
Till at length it lieth
On the ocean’s breast.

Such is Youth’s admiring,
Such is Love’s desiring,
Such is Hope’s aspiring
For the higher goal;
Such is man’s condition
Till in heaven’s fruition
Ends the mystic mission
Of the eternal soul.

In the soft sunny regions that circle the waist
Of the globe with a girdle of topaz and
gold,
Which heave with the throbbings of life where they’re
placed,
And glow with the fire of the heart they
enfold;
Where to live, where to breathe, seems a paradise
dream—­
A dream of some world more elysian than
this—­
Where, if Death and if Sin were away, it would seem
Not the foretaste alone, but the fulness
of bliss.

Where all that can gladden the sense and the sight,
Fresh fruitage as cool and as crimson
as even;
Where the richness and rankness of Nature unite
To build the frail walls of the Sybarite’s
heaven.
But, ah! should the heart feel the desolate dearth
Of some purer enjoyment to speed the bright
hours,
In vain through the leafy luxuriance of earth
Looks the languid-lit eye for the freshness
of flowers.